Theater will never, and never has, gotten audiences like film. But theater goes to work on society in a different and more subversive way.

I've always sensed for myself an obligation to bear witness to my time.

From early on there were two things that filled my life - music and storytelling, both of them provoked by my father. He was a jazz pianist and also a very good storyteller, an avid reader. He passed both those interests on to me.

If the nature of human experience changes with the color of a man's skin, then the racists have been right all along.

I'm always in disguise in one form or another in my plays.

There is a desperate tendency to try to legislate artists, to try to lay down rules for their obligations to society. Just leave artists alone. If you are a true artist, you will have a very finely tuned moral mechanism.

You cant legislate into existence an act of forgiveness and a true confession; those are mysteries of the human heart, and they occur between one individual and another individual, not a panel of judges sitting asking questions, trying to test your truth.